Digital Photography — Managing a Passion, Part I …

I developed a passion for photography in college and my first job after graduating was in the photo department of a trade magazine in New York City. While I loved taking pictures, I was not a fan of working with darkroom chemicals, and after I began my teaching career, I drifted away from serious photography and concentrated on family and vacation photos. All that changed for me with the arrival of digital cameras in the 1990’s. By today’s standards the first commercially available digital cameras produced crude images, but I saw the process as nothing short of magical, and I was hooked. In 2015 darkrooms and chemical developing is a thing of the past, and photos taken with cellphone cameras can produce better images than photos taken with a $20,000 digital camera in the early 1990s.

Digital cameras come in all shapes and sizes, but by far the most popular are cellphone cameras, which are with us everywhere we go. Having easy access to a camera can mean taking lots of pictures, and the question then arises — what do we do with all of these photos? Many of us keep the photos on our phones, until one day the phone sends a message that it is running out of storage space. Then what?

During our recent visit to our grandchildren in Hawaii, both Eddie and I found ourselves constantly taking pictures with our iPhone cameras. I wasn’t worried about taking too many photos, because my new iPhone 6 has 64 GB (gigabytes) of memory, but Eddie’s iPhone 5c has only16 GB, and before we flew back to Florida, he started receiving  Memory Low messages.

When that happens, it is time to download some photos to your computer. With both an iPhone and Android phone you are probably saving many of your photos to the Cloud, but it is always a good idea to save them to your computer as well. On both the Mac and PC, if you connect your phone to the computer with a USB cable, photos can be imported directly to the computer using several different methods. If you use a Mac, one of these methods is to use the native application, Capture, that recognizes a cellphone as an external drive and allows the import of all or selected images. Windows computers also recognize cellphones as external drives and will let you import photos directly into the Photo Gallery. On both platforms you can also import photos using the iTunes application. If you need help in transferring photos to your computer, perform a Google search on how to transfer photos from iPhone (or Android) to Mac (or Windows). There are numerous website that will take you through the process step-by-step.

In most cases, even though your photos have been transferred to a computer, they still exist on your phone and your  next task is to delete unwanted photos. If you want to delete all your photos, or a large group of photos, this is a relatively easy task, but it you want to pick and choose, the only option is to look at each photo and trash them one at a time. 

For directions on deleting large groups of photos on an iPhone, visit www.iphonehacks.com/2014/07/bulk-delete-photos-ios.html. Since I am not well versed with an Android phone, I recommend doing this web search — delete multiple photos android phones.

Next week’s column will cover my preferred method of managing all my photos once they are transferred from my camera, or iPhone, to my computer.

New Technology All Around and Figuring it all out …

I am writing this week's OnMouseClick sitting in the middle seat of a Southwest airplane bound for Orlando on the last leg of our trip back from Hawaii. I decided to begin writing after watching about an hour of mindless television on my iPad. Southwest planes does not offer individual viewing screens. Instead, they require passengers to use their personal devices — smartphones, tablets or laptops — to connect to a WiFi network offering realtime TV, music, movies and Internet access. Movies and Internet access require payment, while TV and music are complimentary. 

Over the past decade, travel by air has become extremely uncomfortable. Seats have been made smaller, legroom has shrunk, the number of bathrooms have decreased and the remaining ones are much smaller, and extra fees are charged for just about everything. What has improved is the entertainment options, thanks to advances in electronics and technology. 

While air travel has become a less than pleasurable experience, technology has made traveling by automobile more pleasurable. Cars today are as much computers as they are engines, and the computers work tirelessly to make us safer and more comfortable. We recently purchased a new Honda Odyssey, and were amazed by some of the computerized features of the vehicle, a few of which I have mentioned in previous articles.

If you have recently purchased a new car, you may have found the vehicle owners manual a bit overwhelming. Our Odyssey includes a 561 page owners manual, as well as a separate 324 page manual about the navigation system. Some of the vehicle features are controlled with nothing more than an on and off switch, while others are more complex and cannot be adequately used without extensive review of the manuals. The heated seats are operated with an high-low button, but working the touch controlled audio, information and navigation systems require a thorough reading of the manuals.

Our Odyssey features a large, high definition monitor located in the middle of the dashboard. When the transmission is set to reverse, the monitor shows a view from a backup camera, a feature which has become standard on many new automobiles. In addition, there is a passenger-side camera which provides a blindspot view of the right side of the vehicle when the right blinker is switched on. During our initial test drive we thought this might prove distracting, but since owning the car we have found the camera view is superior to using the right side-view mirror. The same monitor is also used for the built-in GPS navigation system.

We no longer need a key to start the car, we need only to touch a button. To lock and unlock the door we touch the door handle, and in order for either of these features to work, we need to have a remote control fob on our person. I don’t know how many times I have closed the car door with the feeling that I missing my key, only to realize that the car does not need a key.

Safety features, in addition to the backup and blind-side cameras, include lane-deviation and front collision warning signals. While these features are welcome additions to the driving experience, some manufactures have gone a step further and added automatic front collision avoidance breaking to their vehicles. Google is working on a self-driving car, and after driving our Odyssey for the past few months, I think it is highly probable that we will see such cars on our highways in the very near future. 

Now all we need at TR are self-driving golf carts.

Finding the Best Deal …

In December, while traveling north for the holidays, I wrote about using TripAdvisor to help find hotels along our route. TripAdvisor is only one of what has become a very crowded field of travel websites and apps that search for hotel room rates and offer bookings. Other services in the category include Expedia, hotels.com, Travelocity, Priceline, Trivago, Booking.com, bookit.com